Thomas Malaby arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the Fall of 2001 after previously teaching at Amherst College and Harvard University. He is a cultural anthropologist, and his book, Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City (University of Illinois Press), explores human attitudes toward risk and chance through an examination of the practice of gambling in Crete. His principal research interest is in the relationships among modernity, unpredictability, and technology, particularly as they are realized through games and game-like processes. Other areas of interest include social theory, modernity and institutional legitimacy, urban criminality, and performance theory.

His current projects include an examination of evasion and belonging under the seemingly novel conditions of the "New" Europe, and the status of ethics and contingency in the production and maintenance of online virtual worlds. In the Spring of 2005 he co-organized a conference on the emergence of online governance at UWM. He is an author at the blog Terra Nova, and his research papers in progress can be found via his author page at the Social Science Research Network.

At UWM, he typically teaches the large lecture course of Anthropology 102 in the Spring, and his other course is usually an upper-level course on a specific theoretical or ethnographic topic.

http://www.uwm.edu/~malaby/

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